The
noise analysis for chemical shift based decomposition of water and fat was
theoretically computed for methods that account for single and dual
exponential T2* correction along with spectral modeling of fat. The
CramerRao bound (CRB) formulation was used to study the variance of the
estimates of the water and fat images by computing the maximum effective
number of signals averaged (NSA) for a range of echo combinations and
fat-water ratios. These theoretical results predict that noise performance
degrades with independent estimation of T2* of water and fat.